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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.


Seamus Heaney

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PAT CONROY I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1...
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PETER HELLER

More Seamus Heaney

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
SEAMUS HEANEY words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
SEAMUS HEANEY Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into your...
SEAMUS HEANEY The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpec...
SEAMUS HEANEY Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it o...
SEAMUS HEANEY One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himse...
SEAMUS HEANEY Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance...
SEAMUS HEANEY The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival i...
SEAMUS HEANEY The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to su...
SEAMUS HEANEY The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was gi...
SEAMUS HEANEY My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gael...
SEAMUS HEANEY I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign a...
SEAMUS HEANEY In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEY I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
SEAMUS HEANEY Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
SEAMUS HEANEY Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a pea...
SEAMUS HEANEY A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously ...
SEAMUS HEANEY Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our...
SEAMUS HEANEY Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
SEAMUS HEANEY In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students lear...
SEAMUS HEANEY The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
SEAMUS HEANEY If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there'...
SEAMUS HEANEY I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and a...
SEAMUS HEANEY Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's system...
SEAMUS HEANEY But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutal...
SEAMUS HEANEY I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabite...
SEAMUS HEANEY Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site o...
SEAMUS HEANEY No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself mor...
SEAMUS HEANEY Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium its...
SEAMUS HEANEY The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were ...
SEAMUS HEANEY I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow beh...
SEAMUS HEANEY The next move is always the test.
SEAMUS HEANEY It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir;...
SEAMUS HEANEY Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is t...
SEAMUS HEANEY Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably righ...
SEAMUS HEANEY I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEY I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
SEAMUS HEANEY In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes...
SEAMUS HEANEY Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into langu...
SEAMUS HEANEY As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of...
SEAMUS HEANEY But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going ...
SEAMUS HEANEY Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
SEAMUS HEANEY The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the reso...
SEAMUS HEANEY I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
SEAMUS HEANEY In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
SEAMUS HEANEY The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are p...
SEAMUS HEANEY Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
SEAMUS HEANEY I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward...
SEAMUS HEANEY In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY All I know is a door into the dark
SEAMUS HEANEY Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.
SEAMUS HEANEY The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where y...
SEAMUS HEANEY To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in ther...
SEAMUS HEANEY You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
SEAMUS HEANEY Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit...
SEAMUS HEANEY Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and be...
SEAMUS HEANEY I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 E...
SEAMUS HEANEY Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's do...
SEAMUS HEANEY Unless we constantly replenish our supply of calcium, drop by drop, our bones become thinner from de...
ROBERT HEANEY [WHAT IT DOES: With 99 percent of the body's calcium stored in the skeleton and teeth, the main role...
ROBERT HEANEY It's a marvelous campaign, but it didn't increase milk consumption.
ROBERT HEANEY The artifacts are ... the treasures of Peru's most famous pre-Colombian city. On the other hand, Yal...
CHRIS HEANEY Bones are meant to sustain work. If you don't work and exercise and put some stress on the bones, yo...
ROBERT HEANEY My eyebrows - they have a life of their own. I don't arch them on purpose; I don't do, like,...
SEAMUS DEVER My eyebrows - they have a life of their own. I don't arch them on purpose; I don't do, like,...
SEAMUS DEVER My wife Juliana and I first saw Eurovision while on our honeymoon in Greece in 2006, and we were ama...
SEAMUS DEVER He's got an out-clause to go overseas, but I'm probably 90 per cent sure that Motts would be staying...
SEAMUS MCPEAKE Mobile entertainment is, without a doubt, the future of the phone. In December, 56 million mobile su...
SEAMUS MCATEER You have to give the Rampage a lot of credit. Their game plan was to put the puck on net and keep it...
SEAMUS KOTYK The closed carrier portals and the limited interfaces make it difficult for new brands to break in. ...
SEAMUS MCATEER When you look at the enabling technologies for live voice, most consumers have speakers, many have a...
SEAMUS MCATEER Better a bald head than no head at all
SEAMUS MACMANUS Let me describe it as a momentous meeting. It was a good, workman-like meeting.
SEAMUS MALLON It doesn't provide any compelling advantage for consumers. We don't see it playing a role on the con...
SEAMUS MCATEER If you can't imagine female torch singers and Skrillex-style demon techno onstage at the same mo...
SEAMUS DEVER I used to love stage above all, but that was when I was a single man. As I get older, the time commi...
SEAMUS DEVER The undersea world surrounding Green Island looks just like a water fairyland.
MEHGAN HEANEY-GRIER